Esquire's Best New Restaurants of 2013

There is just too much. There are just too many exciting phenomena happening in the world of American dining right now. Fabulous Peruvian food, a German wurst palace, lots of shrimp and grits, the continued onslaught of Italian. Cronuts. To try to ascribe a singular meaning to it all would be like trying to drink a pork chop. So we've done something far more useful: distilled what's important and innovative and fun right now into a simple list, A to Z. Twenty astonishing new restaurants highlight this abridged encyclopedia. The rest is just really good gravy.
More interested in what goes on behind the scenes? Shhh! These are the restaurant secrets chefs won't tell you.

Restaurant of the Year

Restaurant of the Year

Betony, New York, NY

You step off the Fifty-seventh Street sidewalk into a soaring dining room lined with cozy tufted banquettes; shafts of soft light slide down faux-antique moldings and painted brick walls. Behind the twelve-seat bar, bottles rest on stacks of ascending backlit cubicles. Servers outfitted discreetly in black and white buzz around Eamon Rockey, the friendly, utterly professional general manager, impeccable in Brooks Brothers. Guests know not to dress for some gastrodive on the Lower East Side.

The wine list by sommelier Luke Wohlers — who, like Rockey and chef Bryce Shuman, is a veteran of the vaunted restaurant Eleven Madison Park, downtown — is fifty pages well-thought-out, and to consult him is to engage in gentlemanly conversation. No menu item tops $36, and some people just nosh at the bar on small dishes, which include tantalizing whipped-foie-gras bonbons marinated in Calvados brandy, with a crunchy bark of candied cashews revealing a cool, soft center and a dusting of black pepper and cinnamon sparking them up. There's also a canny play on the tuna melt, transformed here into a round of brioche layered with sushi-grade tuna, chive mayonnaise, creamy melted Valle d'Aosta fontina cheese, tomato, and a dash of wood sorrel. Canny and addictive.

Shuman wants every ingredient to reinforce the others and pack a surprise. He cooks short ribs in beef fat to a rosy succulence at 135 degrees for two days. The ribs, now suffused with flavor, are then seared over charcoal and paired with nubbins of sweetbreads and romaine. It is a stunning sublimation of beef that joins a pantheon of iconic dishes that include Daniel Humm's foie-gras-stuffed roast chicken at the Nomad and Daniel Boulud's truffled DB Burger.

Betony is a signal that fine dining can thrive without pretense or ridiculous prices when driven by a brilliant young American chef and buoyed by a staff eager to grant each guest's request.

Chef of the Year: Michael Chiarello

Chef of the Year: Michael Chiarello

Coqueta, San Francisco, CA

Back in the 1980s, Michael Chiarello pioneered what came to be known as Cal-Ital cuisine (that's Cal-ifornia and Ital-y) at Tra Vigne, his Napa Valley restaurant. He went on to become one of the most consistently rewarding TV chefs, so much so that he disappeared from restaurants for a while. He roared back to the kitchen in 2008 to open the acclaimed Bottega in Yountville, California, because, he said, "my chef friends were having all the fun."

With nothing more to prove, Chiarello has turned his attention to the traditional foods of Spain, whose tapas bars and restaurantes inspired Coqueta, now open on the Embarcadero. Its immediate success, with Ryan McIlwraith as chef de cuisine, is easy enough to understand: The shadowy waterfront place has a bighearted buzz, with Chiarello popping in and out of the kitchen to say hello to regulars and pose for smartphone photos with newcomers. He might bring out a tray of a dozen gobble-'em-up San Sebastían–style tapas, including fried nuggets of potato and Spanish ham, head-on prawns poached in Spanish olive oil, and smoky, grilled Iberian secreto (secret cut) pig — what wagyu is to beef, this is to pork — with a hot-sweet tximi-txurri sauce.

The paella ($40 for two) has already become a signature dish in San Francisco, and the warm chocolate cake flavored with pimentón paprika is not coming off the menu any time soon. I've never eaten better food in Spain. For that reason, and for decades of innovative, irresistible food, Michael Chiarello is Esquire's Chef of the Year.